We can't just allow people to demonstrate whenever they want to

Deng Xiaoping

Bao Tong, who was secretary to Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang at the time, said the paranoid statements attributed to paramount leader Deng Xiaoping were plausible.

"It is very possible that he believed he would be arrested if the demonstrators won the day," Mr Bao told AFP news agency.

"It may seem unbelievable that an old revolutionary who fought many battles during his youth would be afraid of the students, but unfortunately that appears to have been the case."

Anarchy

The material, published in a book on Monday called Tiananmen Papers, is said to have been smuggled out of China by a senior official hoping to promote political reform.

Deng feared house arrest

The book contains transcripts of high-level meetings between April and June 1989, when China's leadership eventually sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to crush the six-week-old student protests.

In one meeting Mr Deng is quoted saying: "Anarchy gets worse every day. If this continues, we could even end up under house arrest."

The transcripts show Mr Deng insisted there must be no killing.

But one of the eight elders in the leadership, Wang Zhen, says: "Those goddam bastards; we should send the troops right now to grab those counter-revolutionaries!"

The demonstrations were the most serious challenge to Communist rule

After the troops were sent in, the papers quote former premier Li Peng - now number two in the Communist Party - as saying that 200 civilians had been killed in the surrounding area.

Those figures are line with the official account of casualties but human rights organisations say several hundred people died in the square itself - the official line from China has always been that nobody was killed there. Mr Bao, the most senior official to be jailed in the aftermath of Tiananmen, said the documents must have come from a very highly-placed official in the government.

"Only senior leaders have access to this type of information, which would have been off-limits to even middle-ranking cadres," added Mr Bao, who has lived under tight surveillance since his release in 1997.

The papers also show how his former boss, Mr Zhao, had pleaded the students' case and argued against military suppression.

He was later removed from power and remains under house arrest in Beijing.

No reaction

Two other former advisers to Mr Zhao also said they thought the documents were authentic.

"This publicising of the documents can help clarify the history of 1989," Chen Yizhi told the Hong Kong Mail newspaper from his home in New York.

Wu Guoguang, now a university lecturer in Hong Kong, added: "Nobody is able to fabricate so many things. I think they are genuine."

Mr Chen, one of seven officials wanted by the authorities after the crackdown, said the papers showed "the disgracing of Zhao Ziyang was totally illegal".

There has been no official reaction in China to the publication.

The leadership insists it made a correct historical judgement in suppressing the demonstrations, which it argues would have endangered the economic development enjoyed by China during the past decade.